Tag Archives: death

Last January, I penned my thoughts about how I could shape my personal digital legacy. The topic came up again this week during a holiday gathering and I referenced my previous blog post during the discussion. (Doesn’t it sound so geek to cite a blog post during a family discussion?)

As we discussed digitizing photos and storing them “in the cloud” it occurred to me that content, such as photos, also need context to provide meaning.

I was thinking about all the old family photos I’ve seen over the years. Not only did I not know who many of the people were in the photos but I also didn’t know anything about the event. I relied on my parents or grandparents to tell me who the people were and the story the photos captured. Without context the photos were meaningless to me and I realized a meaningless photo is more likely to be ignored or abandoned by future generations.

But if I could leave information about my digital content then maybe it would add value for future generations. Maybe, just maybe, it would it increase the chances the content is retained and used in some way by a future generation.

Today, I use Google photos to store my digital photographs online. The tool provides the ability to add photo captions, comments, geo locations, and facial recognition. To be honest, I haven’t used this type of metadata much. But it feels like the right way to start adding more meaning to the family photos.

Several years ago my wife was into scrap-booking. This is a great way to create context for family memories. Each page contained notes, stories, or phrases to describe the event in the picture. Digitizing the scrapbooks she created is a project I need to do to make sure the content is in my digital library.

So I leave these thoughts in my blog this year. I’m sure I’ll be discussing and thinking about a personal digital legacy again in the future. If you’ve thought about this topic and have ideas to share let me know.

A few years ago I asked a friend and former co-worker what he thought about leaving behind information to his family. He replied,

“The family cares about your values and stories. The stories are usually a part of what reinforces or explains values. If you are lucky, two generations will care, and then your stories are trumped by theirs. But like your DNA, you hope the good stuff is being passed on. This has been done with scrapbooks, heirlooms, and letters in the past. So I hope our photos, videos, and family blog posts are things my kids will have. They will also want our music collection, if such a thing is needed in the future.”

He was right. I have access to pictures and other memorabilia of my grandparents, but not so much after that. More important, I have memories of my grandparents and the relationship with them. When they passed away from this life most of their physical possessions were sold or taken to charity. What we had in photos and other memory artifacts we kept. In many ways it seems heartless and cruel, but it is the reality of death and passing.

What will happen to our stuff when we pass on? We don’t choose directly. But there a few things we can do to help those we leave behind to preserve some of the data.

Where do you keep your memories and stories?

If you are like me, many of your most valuable memories are now digitized. Videos, photos, electronic documents, social media posts, etc. But we are a generation in transition. Some of these artifacts are physical and in our possession. Other parts of the data are now “in the cloud” because it provides a backup and is easy to access. Using an internet service also provides physical separation that protects the data from fire, flooding, and theft.

Have you thought about how your family will get to the information “in the cloud” after you pass on?

Two things will make it difficult for your family to find your digital files:

The location of the data

The credentials to access the data

A friend of mine once told me about his experience when his father passed away and he had to try to find all of the information about his financial accounts. His mother was still living but did not know about the bank accounts or investments because her husband did the family finances. After a long search he found the information in a file on the computer simply named “z.txt”. He was fortunate his dad left the file even though it was like a treasure hunt to find it.

The same holds true for us. When can save information to the cloud or put it in files on our computers. But if we hope our children will have access to it after we pass away then we need to leave them instructions on where it is and how to get to it!

A few tips to make life easier for those left behind.

Buy a home safe or rent a safety deposit box.

Put instructions in the box about the location of your digital legacy and how to get to it. While you are at it, you may want to include a list of financial assets as well. Since we live in password crazy world, I also put a sheet of how to access my online password manager. Different sites, different passwords.

Some providers offer a service that notifies a list if your account is inactive for a period of time. I’ve used Google for much of my cloud storage and they offer inactive account manager. If I don’t login to my Google account for three months then it generates an email to my immediate family and gives them instructions for how to access the data in my account.

If you haven’t thought about this, it’s not too late! Go write-up some instructions. 🙂

Last week I wrote about using a Google service to notify family and friends how to get access to your Google account information if you stop accessing your account. In most cases, this is a service that would be used should you pass away from life. It’s one thing to setup a service like this or to setup your own communication method, but it’s another matter if they will actually use the information or pass it along to other generations.

I don’t expect that my family will care much about most of the things in my digital life. My twitter and Google+ updates tend to be random stuff or link sharing. My Facebook posts are usually about family or some life event. Would that be interesting to my grandchildren? What about my blog posts? I spend a fair amount of time recording my thoughts on various topics each week. Will they care? Will they want to keep these things?

The reality is they won’t. Reality is they’ll need access to financial information and they may want to look through digital photos and videos. There may be the occasional family historian come along who creates a book for those alive. That’s a one time event and interesting for a moment, but then everyone moves on with their lives. For the most part, my life is my life to me. I get that.

I asked a friend and former co-worker what he thought about leaving behind information to his family. He replied “The family cares about your values and stories. The stories are usually a part of what reinforces or explains values. If you are lucky, two generations will care, and then your stories are trumped by theirs. But like your DNA, you hope the good stuff is being passed on.

This has been done with scrapbooks, heirlooms, and letters in the past (and those are formal letters, not to-do lists.)

So I hope our photos, videos, and family blog posts are things my kids will have. They will also want our music collection, if such a thing is needed in the future.”

How much information do I have about my ancestors? Not much at all. My guess is you have limited information as well. Does universal access to digital media and the easy of recording our lives change that now? One thing is for sure, it opens the possibilities to share data and create family archives. My guess is some families will take advantage of this while others will not. It takes time and effort to manage digital assets. How many of us will make a plan?

For me and my data there is a plan. But it’s only as good as how it is used by those left behind me. I’d like to think my work will be important to them. But that is out my control and not something to worry about.

I’ll go on keeping and creating content for both personal and shared family memories. Something may be important or valuable. I’ll leave that to decide for those left behind.

There is a saying that there are only two things certain in life: death and taxes. I have plenty of taxes in my life. But I have not yet experienced physical death. I think about death, but I don’t talk about it much with others. It’s not the most exciting topic and some people just don’t like to discuss it. Maybe that will change with age. I know the older I get the more often I think about it.

Back in MBA school, one of my professors made death planning a class project. Talk about weird! We were required to investigate options for funerals, burials, and ceremonies and then create a death plan to make decisions easier for those who we leave behind. The project gave us good opportunity to match study business and planning concepts while at the same time creating a document that would provide value to our loved ones. My plan is stashed in a safe along with my last will and testament.

Earlier this month Google announced a product called Inactive Acount Manager. The service allows you to tell Google how to handle your data should your account become inactive for a period of time. It’s an important service as many people are beginning to store valuable personal information with online services. Think about documents, music, photos, email, and social streams as examples. It could be a difficult assignment for my family to get access to the online photo library if I died tonight.

I signed up for the Google service because I have a growing collection of digital assets stored with Google. Much of this information I keep local also, but I like to use Google as an offsite disaster recovery silo. I started this a few years ago because my duplicated disks at home won’t stand up to a tornado or fire and I could never remember to make periodic backups and put them in a safe.

After giving initial consent the first step is to decide if you want to notify a trusted contact(s) or to permanently delete your files. I chose to setup information to notify a trusted contact after 3 month of inactivity (minimum inactivity period)

The next step is to select which Google data services to give to the contact. Google hasn’t listed all their services here, but I’m sure that is subject to change.

The final step is to create a personalized message to the contact. You might choose to reveal any kept secrets or make confessions in this note.

Do I feel safer now that I’ve done this? Well, this isn’t a one-answer-solves all solution. But it can be a piece of an effective plan to get information to loved ones and friends that one day I’ll leave behind.

I hope they’ll want to see it, read it, and pass it along. There is no guarantee of that but I think it’s a good topic for next week.